I got a haircut today. And I hired a designer to redo my blog theme. Both of these things put a pep in my step. I feel SO much better now.

I hear that there's supposed to be some kind of unicorn out there called a "devigner" that is both an amazing designer AND an amazing coder. I can only assume these mystery people are also pretty, well dressed, socially adept, and good at Halo. All I know is that I'm NOT that person.

When you meet a designer who really "gets" you, you've found a gem. I explained the feeling, the texture, the style, and the elements of what I wanted to designer Jeremy Kratz. Jeremy also designed Stack Overflow, in fact, although I only learned of that after I hired him. Isn't that an amazing coincidence? Funny how these things work out.

Of course, if you are reading this post via RSS, you don't care and that's fine. If you are actually here on the site, you'll see that the new design has a light CSS media query and some specific widths and min-width's set to make the site look better on your mobile device or tablets, as well as low-resolution screens. Basically any browser that supports CSS media queries will have the right bar removed when resized to under 1024 pixels wide, while still looking pretty nice at sizes as small as about 700 wide.

Here's how you do a CSS media query. This is basic, certainly, but it's a clean way to get a good looking site on a large monitor, tablet, and most smart phones.

There's a new navigation bar and search at the top with quick access to podcasts and videos both here and on Channel 9. Also check out the newly styled Calendar View if you want to see posts by month or year. There's also the ridiculous Archiveof every post I've ever done by category. Comments are styled more cleanly and are easier to follow now as well. In the upper corner is the Feed, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

There's no way I could have done this. I'd been messing about here and there with my blog over the last few years trying to update it, remove some things, make it fresher. I was fooling myself into thinking that skills with CSS were design skills. I was fooling myself that having good taste and style meant I could design myself out of a web paper sack. Just because you like nice shoes doesn't mean you'd make a good shoe designer.

I was even thinking I'd have to move off of DasBlog onto something like WordPress. I wasn't sure if DasBlog (which is pretty long in the tooth right now) could handle it. The thing is, though, that this has been a pretty high traffic few weeks and DasBlog has pushed a million page views on this single little box since the first if July. It has survived two Slashdottings, a FireBalling, and being on the home page of HackerNews three times in that period. At the same time, I've watched sad little WordPress blogs get decimated when they got similar traffic, tipping over easily.

The fact is, I like DasBlog. It's got no database, it's fast as hell, and it's more flexible than I give it credit for. I was thrilled that Jeremy was able to create a new DasBlog-specific theme and I was able to drop it in and get it working in 5 minutes. I'm still tinkering here and there, but it's done and it's lovely.

This new site design looks great in every awesome browser like Opera, IE9, Chrome, FireFox, and even all the way back to IE7. It looks like a steaming pile of ass in IE6. As it should.

Coincidentally there's new other designs coming on some sites that I'm either directly involved in or orbiting in an advisory capacity, so expect to see some dramatic changes on sites like http://www.asp.net and mini-sites like http://microsoft.com/net over the next few days and weeks.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

Wow, what a lift from your previous design (which frankly looked like it was from 1990). There's only one thing i would change, and that's the font color. It's a little to light now, #333333 is, in my opinion, much better.

The new design looks great, however I'm not sure about the huge blob of links at the top of the archive page. Also, your calendar seems to think I'm French! I'm in the UK and passing "en-GB" in the request headers, so how is the wrong language being selected? Maybe IP address? (this happens on all browsers)

Cool new design it gave me a shock. Couple of small suggestions though:

You have a comments link at the top and bottom of each article which is good. But the top one is in orange with black mouseover. Where as the bottom one Black with orange mouseover. I honestly didn't notice it at first just with a quick visual scan. I would say the bottom one is used more because you will generally read the post and then click through to the comments so it should be highlighted.

Very, very nice! I honestly hated the old design and tried to stick to reading the RSS while for most blogs I usually click through to read the article :) Also, I'd like to second the color: #333333 suggestion. I tried it with FireBug and it's much easier on the eyes. http://contrastrebellion.com/ !! :)

I love it! I laughed aloud at your unicorn explanation; I read it to my girlfriend and she exclaimed, "That's you!" I'm OK at Halo.

I think I'm average at design, enough to handle creating and managing my own sites. I know my limits and I know what I don't know and I know I'd hire a professional designer if I was serious about making my sites as sexy as can be. I am in the process of revamping my latest site to have media queries and support mobile devices better.

I've been an advocate of this approach for many years. I too am in the "rubbish at design" camp. I do, however, have about 16 friends who are top notch designers, and one who is a "Devigner". I tend to pay them for their work, rather than ask them to do things for free, for the simple reason that it's most certainly worth it... I'm terrible at anything even slightly UI or design related. I can ruin a perfectly good photoshop design by putting it in to HTML... because I don't really focus on the user experience... I focus on making my c# work like a sexy, lubed up machine :)

I'm in the middle of my first personal MVC project at the moment, and I've been really struggling with design. I paid one designer to design the site, and another one to cut it up in to modern html and css (I get it, I just struggle to care that much about how a site looks ;)). I must say £275 later (bargain!) it's looking extremely sweet! It's just a shame I've had no time in the past 6 months to actually work on it!

I've been meaning to do a makeover on my blog since forever, but never find the time to do it. Now, seeing this and after listening to the latest "This Developer's Live" about Taste, I decided to do it at once.

Kudos to Jeremy for the slick new design! Funny because I've been messing around with designs with a similar color scheme and "feel" lately...I guess great minds think alike. ;) And thank YOU for bringing up the "devigner"...you just made my day! I'm struggling on the path to becoming exactly that, and it's definitely not easy. Also, I'm trying really my very best to be all of those other things you listed, minus the Halo part. Maybe Little Big Planet instead. :)

Like the new design, very well done. I especially like your new profile picture!

George

Friday, August 19, 2011 2:42:11 PM UTC

I'll chime in with an nth request for a darker fron color. It took me about 2 seconds to decide on that.

But overall I like the redesign. My main fear about designers is that the page design will come back with all lower case headings and a view that it is better. You have clearly done much, much better with Jeremy.

I was fooling myself into thinking that skills with CSS were design skills.

That's some profound shit right there, excellent point and the cause for some introspection on my part...

David Fauber

Friday, August 19, 2011 3:29:12 PM UTC

No Sir, I beg to differ, since it is your personal blog not your primary source of income, you better design it yourself unless you are afraid of angle brackets and I can bet with the new CSS3 features you can really deliver a nice looking professional blog without even touching any image editing software.

Much better! I am much less likely to send you CSS changes this time :-)

So you can appreciate Jeremy even more, the improvements he made that folks connect with are not primarily color -- they are alignment, visual hierarchy, consistency, balance, appropriate whitespace. The colors rock too, though.

These are principles that any developer can learn and apply. They're not voodoo. But don't tell my team, because I prefer they be kept in the dark.

Perhaps you meant "I am a cornrower, book author, and failed stand-up comic." or perhaps "I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author."?

Developers aren't English teachers either, but I have a lot of them in my family!

Brian Barker

Friday, August 19, 2011 4:15:08 PM UTC

Hey Scott, I know I tweeted that I wasn't sure about the new design last night. After playing with it more, I have to say I really like it. I did notice the improved mobile view and that was much appreciated. Now I can get my Computer Zen on while away from my computer too! One thing I would note, and I see others say the same, is the blob of links at the top of the "Posts by Category". The links underneath are top-notch, but to jump to a section I find myself hitting Ctrl+F a lot.

Hey Scott, the new site is gorgeous! It even makes me want to read it on site over Google reader. The navigation bar is a huge improvement and everything else just feels very good to look at. One suggestion I have, On the home page, it would be very useful to have just little previews of the post, not the whole thing. This makes navigating through pages very easy, specially when looking for a recent (or not so recent). My 2 cents.

Looks really great!Some design changes are not good, like Lifehacker, with the new deisgn I went from checking several times a day to maybe once a week, or DotNetKick (where the design looks like a travel agency from 1972) where I completely turned over to DotNetShoutout. Your site is not in the risc zone.

Göran

Friday, August 19, 2011 7:38:48 PM UTC

My likey. I am also in the category of can't design, but sometimes think I can.

Kudos Mate! I feel like the new design allows the blog to breathe and really highlights your body of work. The new photo is really cool too - it's dynamic. Feels like we're at one of your talks. Like you're a coding Emeril Lagasse and you just sprinkled some oregano on some ASP.Net MVC (BAM!).

I hear that there's supposed to be some kind of unicorn out there called a "devigner" that is both an amazing designer AND an amazing coder.

HA! I nearly spilled my tea when I read that. Make no mistake, the elusive "devigner" is indeed elusive. I call them Sweepers: http://techoctave.com/c7/posts/35-designer-developer-sweeper

On the iPhone the right column is dropping as you expect. However the text is ridiculously small and unreadable without zooming making the scrolling unbearable.

This wouldn't be a big deal if your RSS feed worked with MobileRSS. With your RSS feed MobileRSS feed only displays your disclaimer. I follow about 30 blogs and there are only 2-3 other feeds that have a similar problem. Anything I can do to help resolve this issue?

When you re-do the asp.net website, I really hope you actually support Opera browser, otherwise it's a waste of time.

Monday, August 22, 2011 2:41:15 AM UTC

On your before/after shots you conveniently leave out the right sidebar full of ads in the after shot, which improves the look significantly. The new look is a big improvement but this seems a little disingenuous.

Martin D

Monday, August 22, 2011 9:19:38 AM UTC

Hi Scott, I just scrolled over a couple of your images in previous posts, and found that they all have a colored (transparent) background. For some images this looks okay, but for some it looks wrong as the color should be white. Maybe a default background color for images would be a quick fix, or just update all your previous screenshots. Or, just ignore this comment... ;-)

Scott, well done, it seems you have pulled off something quite rare here. Every time a major website gets a redesign you normally see a flood of I hate it comments but your feedback seems to be mostly positive/constructive!

One little thing, I see it has been mentioned by a few people; I checked out the month view thing and I am seeing it in Russian in FF5 and my computer is en-GB.

I love the redesign. Do you have any tips for finding a good designer? Where to look if you don't know any yet? Preferably something a little more scientific than asking everyone at your local Starbucks. Thanks.